Last week’s column used MSNBC commentator Tucker Carlson’s Hillariphobia to introduce the subject of persistent sexism in the workplace(“Managers who have discriminating tastes,” Keep the Joint Running, 5/12/2008).

Last week, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews provided more Hillariphobic drivel to help introduce this week’s column: “It’s almost as if Hillary Clinton is the Al Sharpton of white people.”

Clearly, the Fifth Amendment should override the First. As the t-shirt says, “You have the right to remain silent. Please exercise it.”

We need to continue last week’s discussion, to help out MSNBC if for no other reason.

Among the many e-mails I received were some that changed my view of the subject:

• An African-American IT professional described his experiences. He did not describe overt racism. What he told me is that over a long career he never stopped being an outsider, and it hurt his career.

• Another correspondent, Roy Schweiker, pointed out that some women, as well as the boss, like watching professional sports. Not all men do. “Of course,” he said, “if a man fails promotion for not talking sports he can’t file a discrimination suit.” Mr. Schweiker recommends calling the boss a “sportist.”

• Then there was this: “In my workplace, to ‘be one of the boys’ apparently requires a sincere dedication to video games and movies. This is all my manager and ‘his boys’ talk about, sometimes for hours on end while the rest of us do the work.

Needless to say, the interesting or prestigious projects, and the promotions, go to those employees who are most like the manager, or play ‘World of Warcraft’ with the manager.”

• And one more: “I’ve been working in corporate America for close to 25 years, in major corporations, including 5 years in Israel. I’m an Orthodox Chassidic Jew and have never been ‘one of the boys’ nor did I want to be.

Did it adversely affect my career? Of course it did. But I chose to be this way and I chose not to join the ‘boys club.’ Did I suffer financially? Of course I did.

Were all these corporations anti-Semitic? I don’t think so. But even if they were, does it really matter? I wish there weren’t anti-Semitism in the world. I also wish we lived in a perfect world. We don’t — we live in the world as it is, and have to deal with it.”

Until this week I considered “diversity training” to be a code phrase for “going through the motions to avoid legal liability.”

That does happen. There’s no excuse for it.

Diversity training has a vital role to play in every company big enough to have a diverse workforce. That role is to help managers especially, and also every employee, recognize how easily employees can divide into insiders and outsiders.

It doesn’t really matter whether the cause is a shared appreciation for sports, video games, soap operas or romance novels. Shared interests help build the trust needed for effective teams to function. When they cross the invisible line where building trust stops and making the workplace exclusionary starts, everyone has work to do.

Leadership has to (of course) take the lead. If a manager loves baseball, and enjoys talking about it with those employees who share her interest, that’s fine … so long as the manager shows just as much interest in talking with other employees about what interests them.

Employees also have a role to play, on their own initiative regardless of how their manager behaves. That role is to recognize outsiders and help them feel included. Not everyone is comfortable barging into a conversation among people who are talking about a subject that’s of intense interest to the group but not to themselves. The group can help by inviting them in.

The group can also help by expressing interest in the outsider: “You don’t talk much about yourself, Howard — what do you do when you aren’t busy writing code?” is a decent, if obvious icebreaker.

This isn’t the tyranny of the minority, and outsiders can help themselves by expressing interest in whatever it is that the insiders find so fascinating. Who knows — even if knitting is your hobby, you might find World of Warcraft has some possibilities, too.

Diversity means we understand that our differences make life more interesting, that we all have common ground if we look for it, and that we turn our understanding into action.

Appreciating differences while finding common ground isn’t political correctness.

It’s simple good manners — no small thing in a team environment.